Adventures in Miniature-Painting

Welcome to Weasel Tails, a blog about miniatures, painting them, and playing games with them.

First, a little background. I started playing role-playing games with my high school friends around 1981. At the same time, I discovered that there was a company, Grenadier, that made little metal dudes that I could  use to enhance the game. They did enhance the game, even if it was to primarily keep track of our marching order. Then I found you could paint the little metal dudes and from those primary colored beginnings I adopted a new hobby that I have stuck with on and off in the three decades that followed.

Over the years the games changed, we tried Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, Shadowrun, Deadlands, Savage Worlds... the list is long, but one thing has remained consistent. Any new game we tried, I dug up some miniatures to go along with it. I got interested in war gaming as well. Warhammer Fantasy, 40K, Flames of War, Warmachine, Malifaux... more excuses to buy and paint more miniatures. So you see where my interests lie.

Recently, and probably ill-advisedly, I thought it might be fun to start blogging about miniatures, painting miniatures, and playing games with miniatures. It's something I do a lot, it's something I know a bit about. Now, to be perfectly honest, I'm not a Golden Daemon winner or an artist. I don't paint for competition or display. I paint game pieces that are meant to be used. But over the years I've been able to achieve a reasonable level of skill at producing table-top quality miniatures and not spend a tremendous amount of time doing it. I want to talk about how I go about that. I also experiment a lot with different techniques I either read about or, less often, think up. Sometimes the results are promising, sometimes they fail hilariously. I also like to try different paints, brushes, tools, and materials again with differing degrees of success. Finally, I do paint these minis for playing games, not just to look pretty on a shelf.


So that's the kind of thing I'm going to write about: process, tools, games. I'll be posting articles that walk through how I did things, what worked and what didn't. I'll try out various brushes, paints and other sundry materials. When I have a new game to talk about, there'll be some of that too. Hopefully these ramblings will be helpful to people or at least entertaining. With any luck, readers will share their criticisms and suggestions for how a pitfall could have been avoided or how a technique could have been better applied. In that way I and anyone else who reads these posts will benefit.

Thanks for reading!
JD